Monthly Archives: August 2016

Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 5: Horror

This week we moved on to discussing a genre I consider one of my least favourite: horror. There are a small number of truly exceptional examples throughout film history, and some of my favourite films are horrors, but the general strike rate of the genre is incredibly poor. For every good horror film there seems to be ten bad ones.

Berberian Sound Studio, this week’s screening, is one of the good ones. I wish I had watched it ahead of time and didn’t wait to see it in class — it’s essentially one long exploration of the visceral effect of sound design and construction in the horror film, which is what I based my Project Brief 2 sketch on. I wanted to reckon with the function and effect of silence in horror, and at first I tried experimenting with literal silence, but quickly learned that that is actually just confusing and would cause an audience to wonder if my piece had finished early. So I kept building it up more and more with sound effects — atmospheric noise, crickets, twigs, a low hum — and, surprisingly, even though I kept adding more sound to the mix it still felt like “silence” in the context of the sketch.

Berberian Sound Studio does the same thing (but, obviously, on a much more sophisticated level) by showing Gilderoy (Toby Jones) at work as a sound mixer in a giallo horror studio. He laboriously and intricately layers a cacophony of seemingly unrelated sounds — knives going into cabbages, lightbulbs rubbing against metal springs, water frying in a pan — to construct a final product that an audience would accept as a suite of genuine live sound effects without batting an eyelid.

I’ve often thought about the effect sound has on horror, and suspected that sound is the element through which mainstream modern horror films most often cause fear and surprise in their audience. Jump scares, which reached the zenith/nadir of their use in the 2000s, are rendered almost completely ineffectual with the sound turned down. I first noticed this when watching the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at home late at night. I had seen the film at the cinema earlier, and experienced a high number of significant scares, but at home with the sound turned down relatively low the effect had been completely lost. Play a really loud, really abrupt sound and people will jump.

This is a subject discussed in this week’s reading1, in which film scholar Rick Altman is quoted as saying “the construction of a uniform-level soundtrack, eschewing any attempt at matching sound scale to image scale, thus takes its place alongside the thirties’ numerous invisible image editing devices within the overall strategy of hiding the apparatus itself”. This suggests that, traditionally, sound was supposed to be invisible, just accepted by the audience as an inherent accompaniment to whatever is being presented visually. Clearly this is no longer the case, and dramatic changes in the characteristics of sound (loudness, timbre, perspective, etc.) are often exploited to achieve a particular effect — and this is especially true in horror.

  1. Sarkhar, B. (1997). Sound bites: Fragments on cinema, sound, and subjectivity. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television, 17(2). ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 4: Gender, genre and sci-fi

This week’s Thursday workshop began with a debate on the topic “Aliens is more than just a sci-fi film”. I arrived late and was assigned to the negative, meaning I had very little time to do any research and gather my thoughts. Luckily, my team had done some great work in getting the main points of our argument together:

  • Aliens is full of stereotypical science-fiction tropes (e.g. aliens) and in fact influenced the shape of sci-fi for the next two decades, particularly through its dark, Gigerian production
  • Science fiction necessarily incorporates elements of related genres like the thriller, war film, etc.
  • Genre is significantly tied into marketing, and based on the film’s poster and trailer you can’t argue that Aliens is anything but science fiction

I thought I came up with a relatively successful argument in retort to something the affirmative said: that Aliens is tied into wider cultural factors active at the time of its making and is therefore more than “just” a sci-fi movie. My response was that thinly-veiled social commentary is actually one of the core features of science fiction, so if anything that argument actually helped the negative side more than the affirmative.

As it happens, my personal opinion actually lies on the side of the affirmative — if genre is a construct that is not inherently sublimated into the fabric of a film itself, but is applied to a film from the outside, then every film is more than just a [whatever genre it belongs to] film. People can come along way after the fact and group/categorise films based on criteria that may not have even existed at the time the film was made. Maybe I’ll get to make that argument in a future project.

The reading1 draws some interesting parallels between Aliens and motherhood, discussing the alien queen as vagina and womb, entered by an army of “ineffectual male gametes”. It takes Ripley, a maternal presence (yet still a hardened warrior) to break through and reckon with the alien mother-to-mother — all in protection of her “daughter”, Newt. The depiction and treatment of women in cinema is something I’m particularly interested in, and something I’m considering exploring in my sketches later this semester. Aliens is an interesting example of gender-flipping a traditionally male genre, though in this case the character of Ripley conforms to many of the traditionally male characteristics a character in this genre would have, at least superficially. Femininity is deeply ingrained in the character in many ways (as Brown illustrates) but I wonder if it would be possible to completely remove the character from any traditionally male expressions.

  1. Brown, Jeffrey A. (1996). ‘Gender and the action heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return’. Cinema Journal, 35(3), pp. 52-71. ↩
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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 3: Romantic comedy

I have a real soft spot for romantic comedies — I am incurably vulnerable to their emotionally manipulative ways. While watching Sleepless in Seattle in class we were prompted to think about feelings and manipulation: what, specifically, is cueing you to feel a certain way at various points?

Sentimentality is one of the film’s greatest emotional touchpoints, and this is visible from the opening shot. In a graveyard, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) talks to his son about his deceased mommy, while plaintive piano music rises in the background. Every element of this scene, from the cinematography to the sound design, is working to put the audience immediately in a particular frame of mind — and to identify closely with Sam while also initiating the plot. Positioning much of the film in the point of view of a child is another way that the film manipulates its audience.

Interestingly, and perhaps even uniquely, for a romantic comedy is the fact that the romantic couple at the centre of the film don’t even meet until well after the half way mark. There is no “meet cute”. They live parallel lives of unhappiness, the film switching between them, before the two stories come together for their eventual meeting toward the end of the film.

This week’s reading1 is exceedingly foundational, beginning with a literal dictionary definition of comedy and then going very deep on what exactly makes things funny (e.g. surprise, incongruity, implausibility, exaggeration and displacement). Nevertheless, it’s important to know exactly how the romantic comedy is differentiated from other genres (or from general, non-romatic comedy) and I did find especially interesting the contention that comedy about “childish energies that can no longer be contained by the adult frameworks”. I’m not sure it adequately describes all — or even most — comedies, but it’s an interesting thought.

  1. Mortimer, Claire (2010). ‘The comedy of romance’ in Romantic comedy. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 69-83. ↩
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